East Montrose retains flavor after gentrification

By Mike Snyder |
May 12, 2002

Gentrification and the townhouse phenomenon came later to this neighborhood than to other parts of greater Montrose. Only in the last few years have developers, hungry for land close to downtown, begun buying up lots and building the kind of high-density housing that is transforming other Inner Loop neighborhoods such as the Fourth Ward and the West End.

As dusk falls on East Montrose, front doors swing open and the life of the neighborhood spills into the streets.

A young man walking his dog stops to chat with neighbors standing on their second-floor balcony. A jogger thumps along to the rhythm of music pulsing from the radio strapped to his waist. A woman pushes a baby stroller down a sidewalk, waving to a friend in a passing car.

This is a neighborhood where a pirate flag flying in front of a house serves notice of a Sunday afternoon party, and where a young mother is on a first-name basis with the guy who rummages through her recycling bin collecting cans to sell for scrap. It's an urban melting pot where young professionals mingle with retirees, recovering alcoholics, aging hippies and drag queens.

Civic leaders here, recognizing that the pricey new townhomes are driving up land values and threatening to push out lower-income residents, are working hard to welcome the newcomers into the East Montrose culture. Their efforts may serve as a test of whether a unique neighborhood, confronted with market forces that alter its physical and economic landscape, can achieve stability without sacrificing its offbeat sensibilities.

"We have blended what I grew up with in the suburbs with what I always thought Montrose was. We are a mutt," said Amy Barnes, 32, who moved to the neighborhood in 1998.

If the rising homeownership rates and yard-of-the-month competition have lent a somewhat more mainstream gloss to East Montrose, streaks of eccentricity are still evident.

A house painted a vivid purple, with bright yellow trim, stands proudly in the middle of one block. People walking their dogs past another house in the neighborhood occasionally do a double-take when they see offerings of fruit, bread and milk left on an arrangement of bricks at the base of an old tree.

No one seems to know what it means, and most prefer the spice of mystery.

"The market changes don't seem to me to have changed the kind of people who want to live in the neighborhood," said Cheryl Hastings, president of the East Montrose Civic Association. "The people who are moving in are coming here because of its diversity and interesting character. As soon as they're here, they're one of us."

That was certainly the case for Joe Vodvarka, a software company manager who left his home of 10 years in far west Houston and bought a new townhouse in East Montrose in 1998.

Vodvarka, 45, loved the raw urban feel of his new neighborhood and found a sense of camaraderie and joie de vivre that he had never felt in the suburbs.

"Part of the attraction is the bohemian nature of this whole area," Vodvarka said. "We live in a society now that's gotten so sterile. You can go into one town center and not know the difference from the next because everything looks the same."

Vodvarka's elegantly designed townhouse, however, is not typical of those that have generated complaints that surface often on the neighborhood e-mail network.

The scale of his house and its setback from the street are compatible with other houses on the block. Many of the neighborhood's other townhome projects crowd three or four dwellings onto a lot and are built out to the street, giving neighbors in smaller houses a view of townhouse walls rather than the streetscape.

Most of East Montrose has no deed restrictions that might be used to control the impact of new development, although residents have begun to take advantage of new city procedures to petition for prevailing lot sizes and setback limits.

The design of many of the new townhomes discourages interaction with neighbors, said City Councilwoman Annise Parker, who has lived in East Montrose for more than 11 years.

"The Montrose box turns a blank face to the street," Parker said. "The resident pulls into a garage, closes the door and pulls up the drawbridge.

"The challenge for longtime residents is to get these new neighbors out of the boxes and into the street, into the life of the neighborhood and into the civic club."

Builders and developers say high land costs are the primary reason for the proliferation of townhouses and lofts in neighborhoods near downtown.

"If I could buy one lot and put up a lovely Victorian with a fence around it, I would prefer to do that," said Martin Lide, who built a medium-sized townhome project in East Montrose last year. "But it would cost me more to build than I could sell it for."

Lide said the people who buy the townhouses love them, but he is resigned to the fact that he and his professional colleagues will never win any popularity contests among residents of the older homes.

"Categorically," he said, "they are predisposed not to like me."

While some residents complain bitterly about the townhomes, others are trying to adapt.

Mark and Jenny Johnson moved to East Montrose from Austin about two years ago and were delighted with their home and their new neighbors. The front porch of the house next door sports an assortment of curiosities, including an antique gas pump and a pile of bowling pins.

About a month ago, construction began on a large townhome project on the site of an old apartment complex just west of the Johnsons' house. The destruction of trees, the nonstop construction noise and the prospect of three-story residences towering over their bungalow have been a trial, they say, but the couple remain enthusiastic about their new community.

"I think this is the best place we've ever lived," said Jenny Johnson, a 30-year-old free-lance writer.

She and Mark, who teaches German at the University of Houston, like the fact that people walk in East Montrose. Several restaurants and a small grocery store are within a few blocks of their house.

They worry, though, about the long-term impact of the new development.

Some property values in the neighborhood have more than doubled in the past four or five years. One home valued on tax rolls at $95,000 in 1998 now has a taxable value of $185,500, and is on the market for $194,900.

"Definitely, as property values rise, people with nontraditional lifestyles are going to find it hard to afford living here," Jenny Johnson said.

Along with economics, some long-term residents see evidence of a gradual change in attitudes.

Gayle Ramsey, a corporate recruiter who has lived in East Montrose since 1977, said the level of tolerance has declined in the last 10 years, though it remains high compared to most middle-class communities.

"Some of the new (townhouse) owners profess to love diversity, but some if them are actually bothered by it," Ramsey said.

A few residents pointed to a dispute last year over a halfway house for sex offenders as evidence of a creeping not-in-my-backyard mentality. The facility ultimately moved out of East Montrose in response to neighborhood pressure.

Parker and other civic leaders, however, said they doubted that the halfway house would have been tolerated even in the most wide-open days.

A better measure of prevailing attitudes, they say, is the neighborhood's relationship with Houston Aftercare, a drug and alcohol treatment organization that houses its clients in several East Montrose houses.

Barnes said Houston Aftercare residents were helpful in last year's project to board up and ultimately demolish an abandoned house where drug sales and prostitution were flourishing.

"They are a fantastic organization that is doing something good in the neighborhood," Barnes said. "They have a real focus."

Barnes and her husband, an energy insurance broker, bought their 92-year-old "four-square" -- a two-story house with two perpendicular structural walls -- in 1998 as an investment. The previous owner had lived there since the 1970s and kept chickens in the back yard.

The couple spent $120,000 on repairs and renovations and leased the upper floor to a tenant to recover some of the costs.

"We didn't want to just slap up a rental," she said. "We brought Montrose into the house."

About a year and a half after they moved in, their first child, Kendall, was born. Barnes, who had also worked in the insurance field, became a stay-at-home mom. The family joined the civic club, which Parker and other neighborhood leaders had founded a few years before, to get a discount on homeowners insurance.

Barnes gradually became more involved with the organization as the family's connection to the neighborhood strengthened. She became membership chairwoman, then president, relinquishing that post to Hastings in January.

Kendall's birth on March 15, 2000, was part of a mini-baby boom in East Montrose, which traditionally had not been regarded as particularly child-friendly. Barnes said she was aware of six other babies born in the neighborhood that year, and seven more in 2001.

Figures for a U.S. census "block group" that includes East Montrose and the neighborhood south of it show a decline in the number of children between 1990 and 2000, but residents said the births they know about have occurred in the last two or three years.

As much as Barnes has grown to love her neighborhood, she said she does not expect to raise Kendall there.

"I can't teach my son to ride a bike here, because the streets are so busy and the sidewalks are torn up," Barnes said. "In the next couple of years, you'll see a rotation out."

The census figures, analyzed for the Chronicle by University of Houston sociology professor Karl Eschbach, show increases in the proportion of married couples, homeowners and people ages 45 to 64 between 1990 and 2000.

"All of that is consistent with the displacements of younger, single individuals -- possibly gay, although we don't know that from the census -- with new housing stock that requires a higher income and is more appealing, maybe, to mature, married couples," Eschbach said.

The changes have prompted some resentment among longtime gay residents. Two years ago, a columnist in a gay newspaper lamented the loss of her beloved "gay ghetto." Barnes said a few gay couples have referred to families like hers as "breeders," although she and others said relations between gay and straight residents generally are good.

Despite the signs of growing affluence and stability, the problems that made East Montrose a no-man's land for real estate investment until a few years ago have not disappeared. Prostitutes traverse the neighborhood to reach the nearby Westheimer strip, and drug dealers cross in the other direction headed for the Fourth Ward, several residents said.

Burglaries of homes and cars are common. Burglars removed tools, paint and supplies from Barnes' home while they were renovating it, and residents exchanged e-mails about a recent rash of bicycle thefts.

Bob Novotney, owner of the Texas Junk shop on the neighborhood's eastern fringe, said some of the new residents moving in from the suburbs neglect to lock their cars, betraying their lack of familiarity with the realities of urban life.

"They're ignorant," he said. "They might have come from a gated community."

Novotney, who lives above the shop he opened in 1979, has had a series of conflicts with leaders of a church called Ecclesia that bought a vacant church sanctuary and gymnasium next door to him last year. The church, which holds its worship services outside the neighborhood, plans to operate a bookstore, coffee shop and art gallery in the Montrose buildings.

The church hosted a few events in East Montrose earlier this year before problems with required city occupancy permits forced it to close the buildings. Novotney said he likes the church representatives he has met but was irked because they failed to provide adequate parking.

Generally, churches have not fared well in East Montrose. Ecclesia pastor Chris Seay said churches that have opened and closed over the years "didn't connect with Montrose, and none of them have been successful."

He said Ecclesia (derived from the Greek word for church) is intended as an "alternative spiritual community" that expresses faith through art and literature -- an approach that might be better suited to the evolving East Montrose aesthetic.

If Seay and his colleagues can connect with the soul of East Montrose, they will find that it's easy to recognize but harder to categorize. Its essence is perhaps best expressed in the words of Vodvarka, the townhouse owner who found in the neighborhood the lifestyle and values he had craved.

"This neighborhood got me politically aware; it got me civically aware," he said. "I'm a busy professional, and I always thought if I just paid my taxes, the right things will happen. But that's not necessarily true, so I got to know my neighbors. And the value is in the differences among us, not in our similarities."